Re: Mad Chatter's take on Mandatory Organ Donation

Personal rights be damned! It is the meticulous emphasis on personal rights which kink the flow of an otherwise flawless democracy. Organ donations should be mandatory, I have mine down one and all to be donated at the moment of my death or viably permanent loss of consciousness.

"As citizens of a democracy, we simply enjoy our freedoms far too much to surrender them for a cause that, while noble and benevolent, is severely tarnished." Resonantly spoken! But cherish your freedoms by perpetuating them so that they remain polished. Trite.

Don't get me wrong, donor programs send vulturous, eager, stab happy people to follow ambulances, I've known some of these people, they are exactly as you've pictured them. But if in chance I am the recipient of an hepectomy while it's still servicing my still breathing body, but then my liver is given to someone else who can use it, that's democracy! Surely you cannot put so much weight into one single though very large example of a near miss as though it were the norm. People aren't stupid, even if they are motivated to steal your vital this's and that's. If that mans brain were taken out of his head and donated to research over his condition, or his heart lungs and blood given over to other people who weren't the lazarus that he was and weren't clinically pronounced dead but were in fact terminally ill, noone's the wiser. Who are we sparing here? Him? He didn't know he was going to wake up, his family? Doctors told them he was already gone. His organs? Why the @#$# save his organs just in case exactly what happened did? That is so ridiculously beyond probability that even the fact that it occurred doesn't justify pre-empting all future cases of vegetating head trauma with the logic that it will happen again. Lechery.

What about medical costs? We're talking about keeping every permanently comatose patient alive artificially indefinitely just because one man zombified. The anomalies here are the ones that live, not the ones that don't. Greed.

"If a law required all citizens to donate at least one organ after death, what kind of condition would these organs be in?"

I forgive you for this statement because clearly you are not pursuing a medical degree. We're not all quacks, the most simple of all and primary test performed before transplanting any organ whatsoever is a blood typing, they are required to make sure that the organs that are being transplanted will fit into the next person that will use them and not be eaten alive by that transplantee's own body. It should be given that they're going to know which organs not to use, it's not like they just toss them in a basement freezer and mark the expiration date with a sharpie on a ziploc baggie. If this is meant to inspire fear of wasted effort, they don't just take your organs out, they make sure that you don't have any diseases or pre-existing conditions before they even cut into your skin. Common sense.

To religions I say get over yourselves, your body can be a temple and a testament to whatever god you worship up to and beyond it's occupation by a soul with or without the crap inside it that makes it walk around, and it's not like in fifty years it's going to be sparkling after burial anyway. Decadence.

What about cremation upon death? That's like eating a case of mars bars in front of a third world inhabitant. Hypocrisy.

The benefits of mandatory organ extraction far, far, FAR outweigh the petty stipulations which are restraining it from becoming a law, I am personally disappointed in the vast quantity of people who feel that there are valid reasons to retain something that is useless to them and potentially life saving to others, I've lost faith in you, Americans, for reasons like this.